Currently available information appliances include Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), digital cameras, multimedia centers, disk drives, printers, etc. This list is continually growing as more devices are constructed to contain intelligence, as well as Internet-connectivity. However, before true information appliances can become generally accepted by and useful to the majority of the consumer public, they must be as simple to buy and install as possible. One of the barriers to this in the current environment is that, for any appliance that stores or utilizes data that the consumer or some other principal considers private or privileged, the tasks involved in security administration, security key-maintenance, and related activities are often too complex and/or error-prone to be reliably performed by the typical information appliance consumer.